


noose like a necklace

by Lutelyre



Category: Naruto
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Betrayal, Blood and Violence, Character Death, Crimes & Criminals, Emotional Manipulation, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Multi, Multiple Pairings, Murder, Organized Crime, Sexual Content, Songfic, Threesome, Title from a Billie Eilish Song, Torture, of a sort?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-21
Updated: 2020-03-21
Packaged: 2021-02-28 16:41:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23250388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lutelyre/pseuds/Lutelyre
Summary: Bodies are kind of hard to move, as it turns out. Pretty damn heavy, and she’s already covered in gore. A close-range shot is always more trouble than it’s worth, Sakura should know that by now.
Relationships: Haruno Sakura & Yamanaka Ino, Haruno Sakura/Hatake Kakashi, Haruno Sakura/Uchiha Sasuke, Haruno Sakura/Uchiha Sasuke/Uzumaki Naruto, Hatake Kakashi/Shiranui Genma, Uchiha Sasuke/Uzumaki Naruto
Comments: 6
Kudos: 43





	noose like a necklace

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! Well, while the world practices ~social distancing~, it's given me some time to write. I suppose that is a sliver lining to this very anxious time. Hope everyone is staying safe and fic is allowing you some escape! 
> 
> This is what I'm calling my Crime!AU and honestly, I've been writing it for months because I am slow to churn out content. It's inspired by Billie Eilish's song "Bellyache." Also I read the book "Plotters" by Un-su Kim (highly recommend) and loved the gritty, bloody world of assassins depicted so wanted to make my own, but with the Naru characters getting up to all kinds of strife in it. Hope you enjoy!
> 
> Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto. TW for blood, torture, death, CRIME, emotional manipulation and abuse, etc.

Sakura pops her bubble gum with satisfying _snap_.

The sun is beating down on her steadily, air above the black asphalt driveway iridescent and almost wavy. The heat is so thick it feels like she can pull it taut as if stretching a rubber band, pluck it like a guitar string. She wipes sweat from her forehead and flips her hair out of her face, blush-pink curls a shade brighter than her bubble gum—still bouncy from styling it this morning.

There’s blood on the toe of her boot. A garish spray of red up her forearms, a dark splash soaking the neck of her t-shirt, tiny flecks on her cheeks.

Sakura giggles to herself, blows a bubble of gum the size of her face.

X

_Where’s my mind, where’s my mind?_

_X_

“What the fuck are you doing, Sakura?”

The gun feels sleek in her hands, cold and impressive. What had Kakashi said? Look an inch above where you want to shoot, compensate for the kickback.

He looks startled to see here there, at the unassuming duplex house she tracked him to on the edge of the city. His gaze flicks around at the wads of cash stacked neatly around him on the floor, the dirty laundry bags in the corner, his semi-automatic laying just out of reach, and then back to her. He’s surprised, like a willful child caught in the act.

Sakura’s skin feels clammy, cold with the realization that struck when she first walked in that it was true, everything she’d thought he was doing, everything she wished was a fancy, a hideous lie, just her imagination.

She wonders if he knows how she knows, wonders if he’d bothered to see it coming at all, sneaking out every other goddamn night, hiding his evidence so sloppily, like no one would fucking notice. It’s a shame she’s not as blindly loving as Naruto, who could see an end coming from a mile away and still kiss it when it comes home, ask about its day, smile at it like a dying star.

Thinking about Naruto makes her feel sick, so instead she levels the gun at him. Look an inch above where you want to shoot.

His elegant brow is furrowed in confusion. She feels as if she can see the shifting calculation those black eyes, considering her, not yet decided how to explain himself. But then, she notices his hands are still relaxed, and he hasn’t even moved for his gun. It hits her that he doesn’t really understand what she’s here for, doesn’t realize she’s not going to ask for an explanation, that she’s the one holding all the cards, finally.

Even now, he underestimates her. She’d always told him to have a more faith.

“Such a pretty liar.” Sakura smiles very sweetly. “Goodbye, Sasuke.”

X

_Maybe it’s in the gutter, where I left my lover,_

_X_

Sitting in the driveway now, Sakura thinks it over. Bodies are kind of hard to move, as it turns out. Pretty damn heavy, and she’s already covered in gore. A close-range shot is always more trouble than it’s worth, she should know that by now. But then, usually she’s not the one who pulls the trigger.

She calls Genma.

“Right, you’ve really made a mess of it, haven’t ya?” He cocks a grin at her, here and gone like a shadow on shady day. “Naruto won’t be happy.” He strips off his leather motorcycle gloves with his teeth and swaps for latex instead, ties his hair back with quick movements; economical, practiced.

“I’ll worry about Naruto if he catches up to me,” She mutters, swaying on her feet standing over the kitchen sink, counting money methodically. Three, four, five hundred and that’s a bundle—she loops a rubber band around the stack to keep the fold tight and drops it into the bloodstained backpack at her feet.

She hadn’t planned on using Sasuke’s money, but Kakashi pointed out when they were planning it would probably be a good idea to take at least some, since she’d be running for her life. Now, she suppresses a laugh at the absurdity of this whole situation, using cash Sasuke probably planned to funnel into some shady offshore account explicitly to get away from them both to survive Naruto coming after _her_. She pushes her gum against her teeth, snaps a limp bubble.

Behind her, Genma hums thoughtfully, uncapping a bottle of bleach with a bit of a flourish. “And what will you do then, darlin’?”

There’s a toothpick flicking back and forth on his lips and Sakura kind of wishes she could bite it out of his mouth, bite those soft, expressive lips right off his face. There’s something buzzing in her head. The smell is probably starting to get to her.

“Aren’t you usually paid to take care of messes?” She says pointedly. She doesn’t like how Genma assumed Naruto would catch her. She doesn’t like his skepticism, even as drags the dead body of Uchiha Sasuke, most feared assassin of the city, onto a plastic tarp. She did that, remember?

Also, she doesn’t want to talk about Naruto right now, maybe she never wants to talk about either of them ever again. “I have to get going.”

Genma’s laughter is ringing in her ears as she leaves.

X

_What an expensive fake..._

X

The thing about being on the run from the law without protection from your normal network of known accomplices, is that you sort of have to blend in. Sakura just isn’t very good at that. She’s too vibrant, too noticeable—it’s why she usually always stayed off the scene of the crime in the past, kept to herself for mainly. People always turned their heads as she walked by.

And people like to talk.

Naruto corners her in less than a month, which Sakura knows would make Kakashi cluck at her laziness, but then again Kakashi isn’t answering her damn calls, and Naruto’s always been a persistent son of a bitch.

Sakura could blame the fact that it’s hard to stay hidden from both the police and the criminal underworld at the same time, especially when she has to avoid all their usual associates, the friends in low places she knows are too risky to contact.

No matter how much the robbers, forgers and hitmen of the city universally disliked Sasuke (to be honest, Sasuke had been a straight-up prick for most of his life, ruinously disdainful of almost everyone other than Naruto and Sakura herself, most of the time), the majority were infuriatingly loyal to Naruto, and would have phoned him the second her back was turned. But then, Sakura also knows she’s been careless.

She went out in daylight, even dared to go shopping, blowing huge wads of cash at black-market bag sales. She overstayed welcomes and missed checkpoints, didn’t dye her hair or even attempt to book a flight. She stayed at Ino’s for too long, but the guilt eating into her stomach every time her key turns in the lock is nothing compared to the sweet rush of release when the door opens, of those few blessed moments of safety, where she didn’t have to _pretend_ , where nothing had a cost.

“Hey, sweetheart.”

She should have known it couldn’t last, and in the end Ino paid the debt.

“Figured you mighta’ hidden out here if you were gonna be selfish about all this, and I was feeling lucky,” Naruto explains, when Sakura finally comes back to blood on the floor and Ino in the bathtub, probably getting pruny and bloated by now.

Naruto’s beat-up orange sneakers and old white T-shirt are stained, scratches on his forearms and a streak of red rusting in his hair and dripping over his face like a scar, because Ino is too much of a bitch to give in without a fight. In the dusky gloom even his eyes are dark, but when he smiles at her its wide and bright, the dimmed light glinting off too many teeth.

Sakura tries to swallow down the black clutch of grief welling in her, knowing it would only make her weak now. She doesn’t have time for it, but still her throat tightens like a vise, eyes burning, and it’s all she can do just to breathe for a moment. She doesn’t look toward the bathroom door.

“Hi, Naruto,” She adds a piece of gum to her mouth, idly realizing her hands are shaking slightly. “An eye for an eye then, huh?”

He was right about her; she was selfish. It stung, the way Naruto always had a tendency to be right about a lot of things.

“Actually, I have a hit out for your whole head, baby-girl.” He sounds faintly regretful.

She pops a bubble thoughtfully, giggles because she knows Naruto used to love to make her laugh, what seems like such a long time ago now. She wants him to remember that about her, at least. “Well, I suppose that might be called for, all things considered.”

Naruto’s mouth abruptly twists from its bloody grin at her humor, and now he looks haggard, heavy with mourning. When he grits his teeth, hard, his jaw twitches.

“Why did you do it then, Sakura?”

He gestures with one hand out helplessly, like she brought this all upon herself, and it’s a really shitty situation but he’s just following through on the necessary repercussions. “I don’t fuckin’ get why you did it. What were you thinking?”

His pained confusion is palpable in the air, all the more exaggerated because she’s unaccustomed to seeing it from him, always bullish in every breath, confident to the point of recklessness. His eyes follow her every move like he can figure her out by tracking the beat of her pulse thudding heavy in her ears, the flicker of her eyelashes, the way her lips—he knows her lips so well—part just so.

“How could you do that to us?”

She knows, suddenly, that he’s not going to stop with just her head. He’s hungry for answers, so many answers, narrowing her steadily into his target crosshairs. It’s a wide shot, but she can feel him zeroing in, closer and closer.

A lick of fury rolls hot and high under her ribs, a wave that buoys her up, makes her mind a little clearer. She suddenly realizes there’s a knife in his lap, a gleaming kitchen knife with a rugged handle. Naruto always did have a preference for a multipurpose tool. She’s disgusted with herself for not noticing earlier; she must be getting soft.

He notices her looking, shrugs slightly.

“Yeah, I’m the kind of guy who will stick to my old favorites, I don’t need anything fancy.” He tilts his head at her slowly, and her jaw chews her gum faster, _snap crackle pop._ “I was kinda surprised you used a gun for him anyway, baby-girl.”

He raises the knife slightly like a leering smile, as if inviting her to share a joke. “Honestly, ya usually just drop a bomb or hide a ticker, never like getting all touchy-feely.” She can tell the edge of blade has been used recently, too recently.

The flicker of anger in her chest falters, tumbles over itself for one wild moment and then boils, roars into its own version of a full-blown forest fire, caught on the dry undergrowth, burning too fast to put out. There’s a fluttering in her fingers, in the soles of her feet.

“But, I guess maybe a boyfriend deserves somethin’ a little more personal?” Naruto sounds bitter now, voice soft. “Heard it was point-blank to the head with all the macho style he would’a liked, so, really, what a way to go.”

It was unfair she had to be the one to figure it out in the end, when Sasuke was betraying them both, wasn’t it? It was unfair she’d had to make the tough decisions, the decision that _had to be made._ The injustice of it all vibrates through her, sets her skin alight.

She nods and then shrugs, too quickly. “I thought the gun would give him the right message, that’s all. Explosives are less exact, less traceable. We were taught by the best, so I knew—”

Naruto ducks his head, because any mention of Tsunade never fails to make him emotional, of course.

“—Well, anyway, a bomb is best done remotely, so that wouldn’t have worked.” She continues, aiming for casual as she reaches up to tuck a ribbon of hair that that had fallen from her messy topknot behind her ear. “With a bomb, as long as you have a good system in place it’s a bit brainless. You can detonate anywhere, anytime.”

Or maybe she didn’t have to make the decision. Maybe she had just been caught between anger and fear and when Kakashi said it was time to decide she’d reached for the gun and that was that. She doesn’t know anymore.

She finds the tiny button that’s hidden in the clasp of her earring, shiny gold hoops big enough to brush her shoulders but the activator is tiny really, no bigger than a pin head. Tsunade had liked to say it was one of her best designs. She pushes it.

A pause.

Quite obviously, nothing happens. Her breath, caught in anticipation for the floor-shattering blast that doesn’t come, stutters in her throat and she coughs weakly into the silence.

She pushes it again, harder.

Naruto notices this time, and grins at her again, too nicely, too sympathetically.

“Ah, you know I thought you might try that—you’ve always had that self-destructive steak, huh? Sweetheart, I’d be right pissed at ya if you’d blown us up before we got some answers.” He spins the knife in his hand cheekily. “Just in case, I made Ino tell me how to remove all your fancy back-up sets when I first came by, just to make sure we’re in the clear.”

Sakura feels her heartbeat increase to a feverish pulse, distantly registers she’s starting to shake, gum wedged between her clenched teeth.

“It took a while for Ino to ‘fess, so things got pretty nasty,” He confides, casually pushing the edge of his thumb into the knife. Sakura knows he’s testing if it’s still sharp, and finds herself wildly wishing she could slice his fingers off his hand with it, one slick _snick_ of the blade and then she’d grind the bone shards into his eyes, into the heavy lines of the whisker tattoos standing out dark on his cheeks.

The image shocks her, makes the rage in her chest go cold, because she’s never once wanted Naruto to hurt, never in all her life, in a thousand lifetimes. The buzzing in her head is back, louder than before.

Naruto lifts his chin, and it’s a shame that she knows him so well, because she knows he’s getting serious now, getting to down to business. You don’t become the top crime boss of a city by being a light-hearted, smiley kid all the time, after all. You’ve got to have a little demon in you.

“Now, I’ve got all day to hang out with ya because we’ve got some shit to talk about, but this doesn’t have to be ugly unless you want it to be.”

She manages to stop her teeth from chattering long enough to blow her last bubble, watery, stretched taut as skin and as big as she can make it. At least it saves her having to respond.

He meets her gaze. “Are you going to tell me why you shot him?”

X

_My V is for vendetta, I thought that I’d feel better—_

X

Later, she is lying on the floor of the apartment, and Naruto is crouched over her like a lover.

But lovers don’t typically have a blade against her throat. Naruto’s knife is in fact very sharp still, as she’s found out, and he’s good at using it. She’s lost a lot of blood, but not quite enough to make her pass out. So close, not close enough.

And oh, Naruto used to be such a good lover, she remembers.

He always had a mouth like a firebrand, burning and bright. Sakura and Sasuke would tease that he could turn them on just by talking, spinning bad love poems and dirty jokes and sweet nothings that made them laugh at him but made them hot for him at the same time, hotter than either of them knew they could be, breath coming tight and quick, longing.

All it took was Naruto pressing his lips over Sakura’s throat or Sasuke’s palm, ready and wanting with his love, his heart naked on his sleeve, bared for them. Sakura would feel herself melt into his embrace, would glance over to see Sasuke’s eyes closing slowly, like a heavy curtain. It’s easy to get drunk from being young and powerful and afraid, so easy to be carried away with too much of a good thing.

Now Naruto presses his knife to her throat instead, and she cries because she knows she deserves it.

“I don’t get why you—why you just won’t tell me,” He mutters, a heavy, rotting hurt his voice as he draws another long red line just under her collarbone, inch by inch like he’s painting a picture and just wants another a slick of bloody paint right there for his art to come together. “I thought we promised to tell each other everything.”

His hands are shaking slightly—which doesn’t make it hurt any less, she notices, a white-hot heat and the sharp bite of acid-pain as her skin curls away — and sweat is dripping lines over his face like tear tracks. She wonders if this is ripping him apart too.

Sakura’s eyes are watering, her fingers clenching over her head where he’s zip-tied her wrists together because he is as thorough as always and she can feel him, warm and steady on her rib cage, slowly crushing the breath from her. He’s been going easy on her, she knows. He’d fished out her gum earlier and dear god, she just wishes she had something in her mouth, something to stop her from answering.

She tries to move her head, the blood spreading underneath her and soaking into her hair. That was where he’d hit her first, and everything has been spotty and dizzying since— how long had it been?

Naruto is good at torture, which is kind of surprising—you’d think that Sasuke would have been the best of the three of them, cold and removed like a gun in the night, but he didn’t like to get close, didn’t like to get personal. Getting personal was something like Naruto’s specialty.

Would she ever have imagined being on the receiving end?

The thing is, is that she can never tell Naruto. Losing Sasuke was at least bearable for her, the kind of stinging ache that’s fresh and raw now, but she knows one day will scab over. Losing Sasuke, for Naruto, would be the end.

A tiny part of her points out that he did lose Sasuke anyway, they both had lost him forever. There are no takebacks from a bullet.

But he hadn’t lost Sasuke like she had, really, the gut-wrenching pain of walking into that sparse room and the violent jolt—like coughing her heart up into her throat—when she saw he’d abandoned them both.

“I w-wonder—” her voice is barely a whisper, and Naruto stops sinking the tip of his knife into her shoulder to lean down, his face so close.

“Yeah, baby, what is it?”

“I wonder if you already know.”

Naruto pauses for a moment, and then his lips brush her own quickly, like he can’t stop himself. His mouth is hot, even now.

“I wonder if I do.”

It’s clear then; even if she tells him it won’t make a difference. To Naruto, Sasuke would always be redeemable.

“Naruto—”

He kisses her again, harder this time, and she can tell it’s a slip from the hunger in his lips, can tell he’s breaking by the way he presses his body against her. It’s sad that Naruto always wants things to work out, but Sakura knows better than most there are some things you just can’t drag yourself back from.

She kisses back, and as his mouth opens against hers deep and dark like a trapdoor she gathers all the strength she has and twists under him, drags her hands up to catch on the knife, and then so suddenly—even like it was _easy_ — she pushes forward and then— and _then_ —

Naruto’s neck splits wide open in a garish red smile, blood spraying over them both like party ribbons.

For a long second, she’s wildly certain it hadn’t made a bit of difference —what’s a little blood to Naruto, anyway? He’s made it out alive through a shower of bullets, once his leg was nearly mauled clean off by a police mastiff with teeth as long as her finger and he’d called it a _scratch_.

But oh—

His body slumps sideways, sliding halfway off her. When he hits the floor, his head is turned toward her still, as if about to ask another question.

She waits for it, her heart pounding in her ears.

She can see the mess she made of him—it’s like he’s on display for her to look at, and she hates that she can see everything, the overhead light is much too bright, and glaring. The angle was so awkward the blade is nearly poked through his neck like a spit. It takes a while for the violent splatter of blood to slowly ease into a trickle, staining the floor.

After what seems like an hour but could perhaps have been only a few minutes, her half-drifting thoughts and the jittery buzzing rush that always comes from killing jumbling clumsily in her head, she decides he must really be gone.

Naruto’s face is confused in death, eyes open, bloodshot and faintly wet. Shuddering, Sakura peels her clenched fingers from the knife and shoves it spinning away across the floor. She forces a weak snarl of a laugh around the sobs welling in her throat.

“Always—such an—ugly crier.”

X

_But now I have a bellyache…_

X

When she comes too, Genma is standing over her with a grim look on his face.

He’s already removed Naruto’s body, and presumably Ino’s too, which she supposes she should be grateful for. She didn’t want to have to look at him anymore.

He spits his toothpick to the side like a dart, arms crossed over his chest tightly. “When I said Naruto wasn’t going to be happy, I didn’t mean I was fine with you _killing him_.”

Sakura sighs, rolls on her side in Ino’s bed where Genma has unceremoniously dropped her. The blood in her hair and across her face has dried in faintly sticky patches and her entire body aches—Genma hasn’t bothered to bandage the wounds on her chest or head. She’s probably going to need stitches.

“Oh, for fucks sake, get real Genma. You must have known he wouldn’t take no for an answer, he never does—well, he never did.” She giggles into her hand at her own slip.

“Well, what are you going to do now, then?” Genma glares at her, that soft mouth twisting. “It’s one thing to off Sasuke, no one liked that dickwad anyway except the two of you. But, Naruto?”

He pops open a personal cigarette case, a small square of velvet and steel, and stubs one onto his lips, flicking with his lighter. She blinks slowly, looking at the case. It looked familiar.

“Killing Naruto will have everyone in the dirtiest underbelly of this city screaming for your blood. Never murder someone everyone likes, babe. You should already know that’s the first rule of survival.”

His lighter must be broken. There’s a scripted “O.U.” embossed in the crushed velvet of the cigarette case, almost too small to see. Sakura tries to think straight, unwraps a piece of gum with shaking fingers.

“Genma?”

“Shit—” Genma swears as his lighter sparks on his finger. “ _What_?”

She pops a bubble, her jaw twinging. Everything hurts now, most of the time. She should get used to it.

“How did you find me?”

Genma starts, looks up to lock eyes with her as she chews slowly. All of the sudden, he’s very still.

“Don’t start thinking the wrong way, babe—” Genma’s tone is sounds much quieter now, like he’s thinking fast about something and she’s distracting him.

“I’ll think whatever I damn please.” She pushes herself up on the bed and tosses her head, not without effort. “And right now, I’m thinking you better have a really good reason to be carrying around _his_ cigarettes.”

Genma closes the case with a sharp snap that seems to echo in the air, looks at her thoughtfully for a moment. His hand disappears into an inner pocket of his heavy leather jacket briefly and she zeros in on it, suddenly hyper-aware of every movement, every heartbeat of time.

There’s nowhere else to go now, and she knows it, somehow. Everyone comes to the end of the line at some point. Her road had a few more loopholes than most, but one thing that always set her apart from Naruto and Sasuke was her own tacit acknowledgement the fates would screw them all over, eventually.

Genma takes a revolver out of his jacket, oiled and slick. It looks fancy, an engraved handle and a long barrel glinting in the light. He holds it casually, like it’s no big deal, but she suddenly feels very cold.

“You didn’t really think Kakashi was only working with you, did you love?”

Just like Naruto, his smile is suddenly much too nice.

She can barely breathe, a sick bottoming in her stomach that has nothing to do with the sluggishly bleeding knife tracks on her chest.

“Kakashi said there was _nobody_ —” but as soon as she says the words they ring false in the air, in the way they hadn’t when he’d told her, words so damnable against her skin they almost sounded black, whispered to the shell of her ear in the night like a caress.

“Sasuke always was such a little shit,” Genma says, and he’s laughing a little, laughing at her. “I’m not denying Kakashi was right to get you involved at first, you know. I was on board.”

Sakura tracks the gun slowly. She feels emptier than perhaps she’d ever felt, even when she’d been looking over a barrel at Sasuke’s wide, impossibly dark eyes, even when she’d first seen Naruto sitting so casually in the gloomy shadows of Ino’s apartment.

“Kakashi was never much of a teacher though, huh? Never taught any of you kids any damn self-control.” He sounds bitter, perhaps. As if he’d been hoping it wouldn’t come to this but didn’t have much faith. Genma was pragmatic to the end.

“Ka-Kakashi said we would leave, together, once it was finished—” but she cuts herself off again, tongue against her teeth feeling swollen in her mouth, like poison.

“He’s good at saying shit he doesn’t mean, Kakashi.” Genma’s revolver clicks. “Maybe too good at that bit, I’ve always said.”

Now there’s something almost like pity in his gaze, and it makes her nauseous. She retches onto the sheets.

K _akashi said, Kakashi said—_ It strikes her, too late and faint like an unfinished thought, that she hadn’t bothered to deeply, truly fact-check Kakashi, to push against the slow, steady tide of his murmured plans sweeping her out to sea. At least, not the way he’d shown them how to always look for lies over the years, how to second-guess and double-cross everything they came across.

When she’d come to Kakashi, what seems like months ago now, it’d been with her mind already lost and her heart already fragile, her fault lines fractured. All he’d done was show her where to break.

“So, I guess killing Naruto was just too messy for the plan?” Sakura spits a glob of gum and bile at Genma’s feet, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, tries to decide if she can muster anger beyond the icy swell of numbness behind her eyes. “Time to bag me up, since I’ve done all your dirty work.”

“Well, I’m afraid that is your job, darlin’,” His cigarette smoke is hazy in the dimmed light, the ache of her head and the juddering thump of her pulse making everything swim in-and-out of focus. “And isn’t it my job to clean up messes?”

Instead of the endless black eye of the gun, she focuses on the end of his cigarette, the orange-red glow wavering slightly as he breathes, a pinprick in the darkness that’s bright and hot and—

“—Genma, was any of it all real?” She hadn’t wanted to sound this pitiful, at the end, but now that she was here it doesn’t really matter. She’s had her whole life to be tough and strong and blisteringly defiant and now she’s only tired.

“I think it was as real as anything can be, babe.” Genma says, so quiet she can barely hear him.

X

_Where’s my mind, where’s my mind,_

X

Before, in the deepest part of the night Sakura had woken in a fit, damp sweat beading her brow and the blankets of the motel bed tangled in her legs. Kakashi was already awake, his laptop screen glaring blue. He’d snapped it closed.

“What if they find out, what if they _know_?” Sakura’s words are blurry, rushed. She reaches for him, and he gathered her up and over until she straddled his legs, chest to chest and cheek to cheek, her heaving breath shuddering as he sighs against her ear, deep and even.

“What if it’s all a lie—maybe can I just—I can ask Sasuke and he’d stop, he couldn’t keep this up if we just talked— _what if I can’t do it!_?”

Kakashi’s jaw was smooth and cool, sharp like a blade against her own, his one grey eye lazy and fathomless in the dark and she can barely see him, but his hands are light, on her shoulders, on her back. “Shh, Sakura.”

He always had voice like velvet.

“it’s true, Sakura, it’s all true.” His mouth on her neck, slick and warm, and his fingers sweet on her face, in her hair. “I believe you can do it.”

That was what was compelling about Kakashi, if she only took a moment to think of it, was the escape permitted by his reassurance, given so freely and with no reservations. In their line of work escape is rare, reassurance metered out by how much is given in return. Kakashi promised total freedom and always had, even when they’d first met him on a rainy night caught in the middle of a botched job so long ago.

That night, Kakashi dismantled Sakura’s beginner explosive rig with embarrassing ease, ducked Naruto’s punch and snagged Sasuke’s wrist in an iron grip, cocked his head at the tattoo there of the Uchiha family crest Sasuke had gotten just a few months before, when their lives first collapsed. And then in just a few moments, before they could blink or fight or do something more stupid, Kakashi had secured a getaway car for them all with one phone call and a wave of his hand, smiling his vague one-eyed smile.

Who can resist liberation?

She arches when he sucks a sudden bruise into the hidden hollow of her collarbone, whimpers when he rolls them over in the bed, his form above her like a shadow.

“Don’t you want to, Sakura? Don’t you want to make him pay for it?” He pushes his hips against her own and _god_ , she hates him for this, but she loves him too, just like she loves and hates her boys. The pulleys and levers of her heart are unbalanced and swinging wildly.

She moans, lets him press his lips to the crown of her head like a father would, if she’d ever had a father who mattered, lets him part her legs like her lovers would, if she were in the right bed, if she weren’t plotting against them both.

“I’m a traitor too, aren’t I?” She says into the still night air, half-hoping she’d only dreamed the thought.

He sighs again against her skin, and then he’s flipping her onto her stomach, raising her hips, and his hand is firm on her neck, like an anchor. Like a reminder.

“Sakura,” He whispers against her skin, silky and soft, “Don’t you want to get away from all this?”

X

_My V is for Vendetta, I thought that I’d feel better—_

X

And before even that, before there was ever a thought of Sasuke leaving them both behind, or missing money, or broken hopes, there was just the three of them, with new bullets and hungry mouths, sick with power and flushed by glory. They were breathlessly, terribly in love. They thought they always would be.

**Author's Note:**

> Sad crime kids are so sad. I actually have a little spin off from this world with Sakura and Ino, so maybe we'll see more snippets here soon! All thoughts, comments, noises etc. are super appreciated and WILL feed my soul during this dark time. 
> 
> Suncaught pointed out that she didn't know if Genma and Kakashi were working together, or if Genma decided to take things into his own hands with Sakura and I was like oooh?!? I guess we'll never know?!? What do you think?


End file.
